The Mighty Walzer

The Mighty Walzer: A Novel and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. The Mighty Walzer: A Novel Paperback – March 29, This item:The Mighty Walzer: A Novel by Howard Jacobson Paperback $
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Add both to Cart Add both to List. These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Buy the selected items together This item: Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Shylock Is My Name: A Novel Hogarth Shakespeare. Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention manchester jacobson yiddish funny roth ping table british boy tennis howard pong words hilarious adolescent ping-pong slang laughing philip jewish.

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. An excellent introduction into the game of competitive table tennis, character development, ageing and maturing despite an insecure beginning and of course life as a Jew in a community of Jewishness.


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But why does the reader have to struggle through two or three books? Your main character's life was not that interesting, dear author, and his demands and expectations extremely repetitive and very much predictable So I did like it One person found this helpful. Howard Jacobson is great. While he is describing Manchester of the 50's and 60's, I find it not very different to the New York where I grew up. Howard Jacobson is a very funny man. As I get older I find that fewer and fewer things tickle my funnybone, and to say that when I read a Jacobson book I frequently burst out laughing out loud, is the ultimate compliment to Mr Jacobson's comedy writing skills.

Howard Jacobson is a good story teller. You should also see him read if you ever get the chance, as brilliant and funny in person as he is on the page. Howard Jacobson is a very funny man; a British man who is Jewish, or vice versa, I suppose.

The Mighty Walzer review – Jacobson's ping-pong comedy is a smash on stage

He has written this delightful, yet poignant, coming of age novel featuring Oliver Walzer as the protagonist and the narrator. The Mighty Walzer is a nickname Oliver Walzer deprecatingly gives himself as he looks at his life from the far end of the experience. He begins with a laugh outloud funny description of his parents and both the maternal and paternal sides of the family.

Both sides have very defini Howard Jacobson is a very funny man; a British man who is Jewish, or vice versa, I suppose. Both sides have very definite physical and psychological characteristics. His description of his dad as a young man is absolutely hilarious, and allows him to illustrate the illusion of "grandiosity" that characterize the Walzer men.

In Oliver's younger years his environment is dominated by females, since his dad is away at war. As a result he is incredibly withdrawn and quiet, but as he grows a little older he unabashedly shares with his readers his secret life in the bathroom creating his own porn by cutting and pasting the faces of his female relatives into racy magazines he has acquired on the sly.

He is disgusted with himself in retrospect, but his description of this activity is, trust me, hilarious.


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He channels a middle school-age boy like nobody's business! On the occasions when he is not in the locked bathroom he obsesses with developing his skills at ping pong, having found a ping pong ball in a nearby pond. His paddle replacement in his formative years is his leatherette bound copy of Dr. He has no table, no net; just the wall, the ball, and his trusty book. His skills improve remarkably, but he is too shy to play with others til his dad takes him to the Jewish social center. Awkwardly, he makes friends with the other fringe dwelling boys who find their outlet in ping pong.

This book is funny to an English speaking gentile I can only imagine how side-splitting it must be to the Yiddish speaking Jew! This book was published first over 10 years ago in Great Britain, but since Mr.

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Jacobson won the Man Booker prize in literature in for a more recent novel, The Finkler Question, his books are finding new life and a new audience in the United States. If you are in the mood for a funny coming of age novel set in Manchester England in the 's, or perhaps looking forward to reading ping pong strategy, skills, competition and equipment discussed by an author who knows his stuff, this just might be the book for you! Jacobson is an excellent and entertaining writer! Even with his improvised bat the Collins Classic edition of 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion.

At sex he is not so natural, being shy and frightened of women. And while the Akiva boys teach him everything he needs to know about ping-pong, his father Joel Walzer teaches him everything there is to know about 'swag'. Unabashedly autobiographical, this is a hilarious and heartbreaking story of one man's coming of age in 's Manchester. View all 4 comments. This was different than I thought.

About The Mighty Walzer

When I described this book to my husband, he said 'I feel like you've been looking your whole life for this book, like it was made for you'. And I had to agree. It was like the nerdy anthem that could become my theme song, a book devoted exclusively to ping pong--I even dug through my library-edition bookmarks collection to find the very nerdiest bookmark I owned to use while I read this book. And then it turned out be more of a coming-of-age story with ping po This was different than I thought. And then it turned out be more of a coming-of-age story with ping pong as a trope, which is so It was a good book, very funny in parts, but just wasn't the anthem I was hoping for.

And it was very, very Jewish. If you aren't very hip to Yiddish, you are going to have a hard time wading through this book, because it is stacked with Yiddish. If you just told me what this book was about, I'm not sure I would have thought that I was going to like it as much as I did. After all, at this point I'm pretty tired of coming-of-age stories. And, I know exactly zilch about ping-pong, and have exactly negative desire to learn. Nevertheless, I loved this book. I laughed out loud, not on every page, but often enough.

The Mighty Walzer

In fact, i am still laughing when I think of a few of the things in it that cracked me up. Yet, the end almost made me c If you just told me what this book was about, I'm not sure I would have thought that I was going to like it as much as I did. Yet, the end almost made me cry. As a result, because I am a sucker for the hilarious yet bittersweet, I pretty much now have an immense unrequited crush on Howard Jacobson. Feb 23, Estelle rated it liked it Shelves: Coming of age story of Oliver Walzer, descended from Jews who emigrated from Poland to Manchester and who eked out a living by their wits.

Oliver is shy as a young boy and comes out of his shell by becoming a ping pong player extraordinaire and befriending his teammates who teach him of life. Narrated by Oliver who seems to always thwart himself, the bright star that refuses to shine - in fact insures that it won't shine. Apr 18, Anne rated it really liked it. Really good, and the most superb ping pong novel that I have ever read. Sep 16, George rated it really liked it.

A very good, humorous, engaging read. It's told by protagonist, Oliver Walzer, who as a man in his late 50s, recalls mainly his time as a young lad obsessed with playing ping pong and becoming a national champion.

The Mighty Walzer review – where’s the spin? | Stage | The Guardian

It's set in the s, mainly in Manchester, England. Oliver recalls his upbringing in a household mainly filled with women. His mother's sisters and his two sisters. His father isn't home a lot. Oliver is a shy lonely young lad who forms friendships through joining the Akiva Social A very good, humorous, engaging read.

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Oliver has no other sporting interests and reads a lot, going on to study literature at Cambridge. An interesting, well told coming of age story. Sad fun in Manchester Yiddish sensibility soaks every page of this book. It's sad,funny, "grandiose," and humble pretty much all at once.


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It's a perfect partner for the author's Kalooki Nights. If you still remember how Philip Roth made you laugh when you discovered Portnoy's Complaint, then go wash your hands then read this book. Oct 27, Ronald Fischman rated it liked it. Originally posted on my blog http: Nothing special there, except that he's twelve years old.

His people escaped a dreary existence as beet farmers on the Bug and Dniester valley in the Ukraine. The men - we'd call them luftmentshen , transliterated in Yiddish and not German, meaning people with stars in their eyes because their heads are in the clouds. The women - trapped, waiting for men to notice them, w Originally posted on my blog http: The women - trapped, waiting for men to notice them, without the courtship rituals of the goyish society to guide them.

These women fill the Madonna role, long-suffering defenders of their honor. Twink, Aishky, and Sheeny! You can do anything you want with anderer , usually the goyish crowd, but God help you if what you do to, and with, unserer comes back to family and friends. And if one of unserer starts cavorting about, oy a schande! Evidently, the term "cognitive dissonance" only reaches Ollie's ears once he reaches Cambrdge. This book is at its most convincing, for me, when Ollie, who tells his own story, is in the "outside" world. Ollie's growth into a master "ping-pong" player.

Ollie's feckless attempts to sell as a barker in his father's traveling market. Ollie's furtive efforts to lose his virginity with a real girl. Ollie's throwing a match at deuce because he finds himself to lofty to get down and dirty with the opponent who wanted the victory so badly. Ollie's aversion when he learns that the real reason he got into Cambridge was his sport, not his brilliantly constructed essays in support of misogyny. Ollie has a private life, one which would gross out the most salacious of readers. I'm not going to tell you his fetish, but let's leave it that his focus of attention while pleasuring himself would not win him any friends in the PC set.

This is where Jacobson performs a masterstroke - he gives his first-person narrator a peccadillo that is so off-putting that, no matter if the character is himself with the name changed, nobody would believe it. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole.

We acknowledge and remind and warn you that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. The complete review 's Review:. The Mighty Walzer is narrated by Oliver Walzer. The bulk of the novel describes his youth and coming of age in s Manchester. A shy Jewish boy living in a house dominated by women whom he adores -- a bit too much , it turns out he's a natural at ping pong.

It's not sport that ultimately gets him out of his shell to the extent he can get out of his shell but -- much later -- sex, but he's never entirely comfortable with either. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the novel is how Jacobson conveys Walzer's passion for both ping pong and women -- and yet also shows how he fails to find full satisfaction in either.

This isn't a sports-novel: Ping pong is something the narrator is terribly good at, but he can't fully embrace his talent: He gets into a Cambridge college the "exclusively muscular college Golem" in large part based on their need for his table-sport prowess, and so has to take it up again for a while, but his return to form he easily outclasses almost all his opponents again is described almost incidentally, the sport almost without meaning to him.

Walzer (Waltz) (Die Lustige Witwe)

Part of the problem with ping pong is that it's not taken very seriously -- and even Walzer has trouble taking it seriously: Something insubstantial, piffling, neither here nor there, like swatting at flies. You don't even know you're playing it. Why didn't they just call it that -- Something Piffling -- and have done? And what do you do, Mr Walzer?